Middle East and Africa

Joe Burton

President and Chief Executive Officer

Joe Burton is President and Chief Executive Officer of Plantronics. Burton serves as a hands-on leader, driving business and innovation efforts designed to address customer’s most challenging communications concerns and transform how people engage with each other and the world around them. In addition to his role as President and CEO, Burton is also on the company’s board of directors.

Burton joined Plantronics in 2011, and has held several executive positions at the company, including Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), leading global engineering, marketing, sales, and product teams and programs. His responsibilities included setting the company’s overarching technology, product and brand strategies, and creating a new business framework designed to help the company achieve greater efficiency while boosting customer-focused innovation. This included driving Plantronics’ ongoing growth in Unified Communications (UC), and leading the company’s conversion to offering a mix of hardware and software solutions that are the foundation for Plantronics future success. Additionally, Burton drove globalization efforts company-wide, creating efficiencies and enabling stronger collaboration throughout the business, and initiated the modernization of the company’s go-to-market strategy by driving greater alignment between sales and marketing in conjunction with engineering efforts.

Burton also served as Executive Vice President of Technology, Development and Strategy, and Chief Technology Officer (CTO), where he implemented new, improved operations methodologies as part of the company’s engineering workflow. During this period, Burton also conceived of and launched the company’s innovations arm, PLT Labs, a multi-disciplinary team dedicated to identifying and exploring bleeding-edge communications technologies and solutions.

Prior to Plantronics, Burton held various executive management, engineering leadership, strategy, and architecture-level positions, including roles at Polycom, Cisco Systems, Inc., and Active Voice, where he was a driving force in support of key business initiatives and helped ignite significant technological advancements.

At Cisco, Burton served in various roles with increasing levels of responsibility, including Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Unified Communications and Vice President, SaaS Platform Engineering, Collaboration Software Group. During his time as Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Unified Communications, Burton was responsible for advancing the company’s UC-related technology efforts, including IP phones, contact center conferencing, unified messaging, WebEx collaboration, social computing, and unified communications applications. At Polycom, Burton served as Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Technology Officer and, for a period of time, as General Manager, Service Provider, concurrently with his technology leadership role.

Burton is a seasoned speaker and has delivered addresses at major events such as SXSW, BAPI, Mobile World Congress, and Enterprise Connect. He’s also the author of several communications patents, holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Information Systems from Excelsior College (formerly Regents College), attended the Stanford Executive Program, and is a member of the Board of Directors for the Dominican Hospital Foundation.